Murder in a Heat Wave

Book 3: Martha Patterson Mysteries

by Gretchen Sprague

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

If you are upset that you couldn't get tickets for the world championship boxing bout, ask a friend to invite you to her next co-op apartment board meeting. The language may be more controlled than a left to the chin, but the passion behind it is sometimes no less fierce.

Returning from a visit to her son's family in California, retired attorney Martha Patterson steps out of the plane at LaGuardia into a New York City heat wave. OK. She'll get home to her air-cooled apartment, have a leisurely bath, rest up from two weeks with wonderful but energy-demanding grandchildren, and get back to gentle retirement, punctuated by the occasional commission to prepare a brief or other legal document for friends in the law.

The first sign of trouble is Boris, the doorman at her apartment house. Boris has shed the uniform coat that seemed almost a part of him and is in his shirtsleeves. The entrance door has been propped open, to very little avail. Boris makes it official. He is sorry to say it, but the air conditioning is out of order.

Tired, hot, anxious for respite, why does Martha agree to take a place on the board? There are only two ways she can only explain it to herself. Either she feels it's her duty as a long-time tenant--or she's a damn fool. The board meeting the next day seems to confirm the latter; she finds herself in the midst of turmoil, and tempers rise with the temperature. But could a fight over putting in a new kitchen or selling an apartment really lead to murder? The tenants' concerns seem unconnected to the death of a former archaeologist.

The dangerous task of finding the killer and fending off another murder falls on seventy year old Martha, who combines exceeding common sense with sharp intellect.

Sprague makes her characters live for us, taking us into the world of middle-class midtown Manhattan professionals, showing them as the sometimes flawed, mostly decent humans they are, and giving them one of the city's crimes to roil their lives and engage ours. Whether her readers live in the City or in an Iowa village, there is no mystery writer who shares her crimes and their solutions more effectively. Turn on your air conditioning and enjoy Gretchen Sprague's Murder in a Heat Wave!

Release date: March 12, 2003

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

Murder in a Heat Wave

1 Heat Wave
New York City is apt to go to extremes, and on Wednesday, June 6, it was doing so again. At 10 P.M., when Martha Patterson joined the taxi line outside the United terminal at Kennedy, both the temperature and the humidity still hung in the middle eighties.
The taxi she drew was not air-conditioned.
Never mind; she was on the last leg of her daylong journey home, and her high-rise building, built in the 1950s to the dismay of Greenwich Villagers sensitive to architectural compatibility, had central air-conditioning. She cranked down the taxi window to let the exhaust fumes of the Belt Parkway fan her face, closed her eyes, and drifted back into the semi-doze that had relieved the tedium of the transcontinental flight. Grandchildren were all very well, and Martha was appropriately fond of hers, but when one has been free of child-rearing for upwards of two decades, prolonged exposure to the exuberance and self-involvement of the young can be exhausting. Martha had been visiting her son Robert and his family in California for ten days.




Only partially roused from her torpor by the cab's arrival at her destination, Martha almost failed to recognize the doorman who came out to the curb to help with her luggage. At this hour of the night, it should be Boris, but this man was not wearing his uniform jacket.
The blocky form and square face and the familiar, precisely enunciated "Good evening, Ms. Patterson," however, reassured her; this personage, however unjacketed, was indeed Boris. She had never particularly liked the man, whose difficult standards of decorum she had from time to time breached, but Boris's code of appropriate behavior had become a fixed point in her life, and his present departure from absolute sartorial correctness startled her.
"Good evening, Boris," she responded, and, as they mounted the shallow steps to the concrete plaza that fronted the building, took the liberty of adding, "Are you well?"
"I am, thank you. And you?"
"I'm well, thanks. Glad to be home."
"And we're very glad to have you home. But I'm sorry to say ..." Boris was facing away from her and speaking quietly, so Martha lost the end of the sentence.
Its import, however, soon became clear. The entrance door was propped open, and when she passed through, she discovered that the lobby was as muggy as the street. What Boris had been sorry to say was, "The air conditioner is out of order."


Waiting for the elevator with her luggage at her feet, Martha found that jet lag was combining with the heat to elevate what had previously been moderate annoyance into something dangerously like curmudgeonly resentment. For years, a little grove of potted ficus trees had shielded the elevators and the mailboxes from the main body of the lobby. A recent redecoration, completed a few weeks before her trip, had removed the trees and substituted an openwork brass screen. Ficus, it seemed, had gone out of fashion. Martha had been missingthe little trees ever since they had disappeared, but never more than tonight; living greenery would have blunted, however slightly, the edge of discomfort.
She was trying to adjust her attitude to something more appropriate to homecoming when she was joined in front of the elevator door by a slim blondish woman, a stocky red-haired man, and a leggy little girl asleep in the man's arms. Jeff and Vanessa Callaghan, and the child had a name like Tiffany--not actually Tiffany, but something out of the same box. Harmony? Not quite. Melody, that was it. They lived on the floor below hers, in the same wing of the building, and consequently used the same elevator.
All three were wearing shorts and T-shirts. Sweat soaked Jeff's underarms and beaded his flushed face. The little girl's fair hair clung to her scalp in damp curling tendrils. Vanessa looked relatively dry, but her mouth was petulant. Martha had concluded some time ago, however, that a pout was Vanessa Callaghan's normal expression and did not necessarily indicate her emotional state at any given time.
Martha said, "Good evening."
Vanessa said, "Hi," and pressed the UP button, which Martha had already pressed. "Been away?"
"San Francisco."
"I'll bet you had decent weather there."
They had, in fact, had a good deal of fog. "It was pleasant," Martha said.
"And you come back to this." Jeff shifted the sleeping child's weight from one arm to the other. "I mean, do you believe this? Those turkeys assess us up the wazoo for that crap," the motion of his head took in the redecorated lobby on the other side of the screen, "and then they screw up our sale so we can't get out of here, and now they can't even maintain the plant."
They. The universal villain. But this, Martha knew, was a specific, identifiable they. The building was a co-op, and they were the seven members of the board of directors. "How longhas the air conditioner been out of order?" she asked.
"Six days. Six ... friggin'--"
"Jeff," said Vanessa.
"--days, and every damn one of them over ninety. Tell me about global warming. I mean, how many movies can you go to? That friggin' crew ought to be shot."
"Jeff, shush."
"She's asleep; she can't hear me."
"You don't know that."
"Listen, I mean it. If those turkeys can't maintain the plant, we ought to shoot the whole damn crew and get some new blood on the board."
"Jeff, stop it."
The child squirmed, made a small puppyish sound, and settled again.
Martha kept her voice soft. "Why not just elect a new board?"
"Been there. You know how it goes. Maybe ten people show up, and the old crew gets rubber-stamped by the proxies."


Well, Martha conceded, cranking open every window in her apartment, he had a point. Not, of course, about shooting the board, but certainly about the elections. Martha was one of the "maybe ten"--actually it was more like seventeen--who regularly attended the annual shareholders' meetings. They tended to be discontented shareholders, there to vote in person for opposing candidates. The other residents--those of them who troubled to vote at all--stayed away from the meetings and exercised their proxies in favor of "the old crew."
The open windows were not dispelling the heat. Martha owned two fans, but they were in her storage locker in the basement, and she was too tired to traipse down to fetch them. She undressed, stood for some time under a tepid shower, powdered herself lavishly, and made herself lie motionless on her bed.




A humidity-induced headache woke her at 8 A.M., which would be five in the morning where she had come from. The temperature in the apartment had not dropped more than a couple of degrees, and no air moved through the open windows.
But she was home, and the day awaited her attention, so after aspirin, tea, and toast had somewhat restored her energy (she had prudently stored half a loaf in the freezer before leaving), she put on a sleeveless blouse, a mid-calf-length cotton skirt, and sandals, pocketed her keys, and set out to retrieve her fans. Fourteen years before, sometime around her sixtieth birthday, Martha had stopped exposing her legs to public view. They were still serviceable legs, barring a touch of arthritis in the knees, but what with spider veins, age spots, and a general inexplicable lumpiness, they no longer met American standards of comeliness. She had donated her shorts to the Salvation Army, and had then been surprised to find that loosely cut skirts, even long ones, were cooler than shorts, since they allowed air to circulate all the way up to the crotch.
The stairs and the service elevator, which provided access to the basement, were reached via a fire door at the far end of the corridor. Martha pushed through into the stairwell, summoned the service elevator, rode down, and pushed through another fire door into a concrete corridor. It was cooler down there, and a series of clattering bangs from the boiler room, which was located around a right-angle turn twenty or so feet farther along, raised the hope that repairs to the air conditioner were under way.
A different sort of rumbling told her that the laundry room was in use. She glanced in when she reached the door and saw a woman in shorts and T-shirt sitting on a bench in the middle of the room. A clipboard was on her lap, a pencil was in her hand, and papers were stacked on the bench beside her.
The woman looked up, and Martha recognized Ruth Kaplowitz, an upstairs neighbor.
"Oh, you're back," Ruth said. "Good, we need to talk."
Martha, who was seldom averse to talk, and particularly not with a neighbor as agreeable as Ruth Kaplowitz, ventured into the damp heat and sat down on the bench next to the pile of papers.
"This heat must be a shock," Ruth said. Perhaps it was inevitable that any conversation would begin with the heat.
"Rather," said Martha. "Boris seems to feel that he has failed in his duty."
"It isn't Boris who failed." Ruth stuck the pencil behind her ear. "I don't want to add to your jet lag, but I have a favor to ask."
Martha voiced a noncommittal "Mm?"
"It's about the board," said Ruth. "This air-conditioner failure has stirred up sentiment for a change, and a few of us are trying to put together a plan. We're having a little meeting tonight to see if we can organize a campaign. Can I interest you in joining us?"
An early bedtime would have interested Martha more, but organized action deserved to be encouraged. "Is it to be a nonviolent plan?" she asked.
Ruth smiled. "Have you been talking to Jeff Callaghan?"
"Within moments of my return. One does feel a certain sympathy, of course."
"Well, Jeff will be there. We're going to try to redirect some of that passion. I do hope you'll come. We could use your voice of reason."
Martha noted that her vanity was being stroked. She chose not to resist. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I'll come."
"Oh, good. Eight o'clock tonight, in our apartment."
MURDER IN A HEAT WAVE. Copyright © 2003 by Gretchen Sprague. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.